How To Watch Game Film

(I wrote this for a team back in 2017, from August to September in a little series. Here’s the whole thing compiled to help you excel as an athlete. Enjoy! – Coach Dunte)

Post-Game Rituals

High school varsity football games are played on Friday nights. Thursdays were most guys’ favorite practices–helmets and shorts, half-speed, done in an hour. Fridays were the glory days–suited up and amped up with the spotlights on. Saturdays, though, were dreaded. Every starter knew what to expect when he woke up battered and bruised Saturday morning.

Players piled into different locker rooms, grouped as offense or defense. The coordinator and position coaches were already there, sitting stone-faced in the center of the room around an old projector. A greyscale record of failures and transgressions shone onto the canvas which hung from the locker room ceiling–the game film. No one was ever certain how early the coaches woke up to journal their criticisms, but they always had their notes ready and their itchy trigger fingers were poised to rewind and replay a starter’s failures innumerable times.

Saturday mornings were film sessions. “Look how close you came to doing what we wanted–what the hell were you thinking there–see how your defender just pushes you over?” sessions. “Jeez, am I even meant to play this silly game?” sessions. Sometimes players learned what to do better. Sometimes coaches appreciated effort and intention, even when execution was off. Mostly, though, film sessions were coaches’ opportunity to fabricate the illusion of control over the game’s outcome–to say, “this specific play set us up to lose field position/possession/momentum/the game.”

If you really want to get better, that is not the best way to watch game film. This series contains suggestions for using your game film to improve your execution. And you don’t have to spend your Saturday mornings inside a musty locker room to put them to use.

Critique While You Watch, But Don’t Judge

When reviewing game film, you have to learn writer/editor duality. On one side, you are a player, prone to fits of passion and lapses of judgment. On the other side, you are a spectator, detached from events on the field. When playing, you cannot analyze. When analyzing, you cannot play. During competition, you react and adjust. After competition, you observe and critique.

During the chaos of a game, you still need a rational mind so that you don’t repeat costly mistakes. During the quiet of a film session, you still need compassion for the athlete striving on the field, so that you don’t berate yourself over tiny errors. With those notes in mind, this four-part series will explain how to maximize your game film time.

Categorize The Errors You See On Film

During film sessions, keep a full-size notebook on hand. When you notice a mistake during play, take the following notes:

elapsed time during the game
your field position
what mistake was made
what skill the mistake is related to
the two players on either side of your mistake
- either the player who threw you the disc and your intended receiver OR
- your match-up and the player who threw to them

Try to keep your list of skills succinct. In your first film session, perhaps stick to forehand, backhand, and overhead throws; receiving dumps, cutting under, or going deep; marking or field defending; fouls; and a loose “other” category.

By tracking the context in which your errors occur, you will notice trends.

In a nine-game tournament, do you consistently throw poor flicks in the second half?
At practice, work to fatigue-proof your forehand.

After a turn, do you get smoked by your match-up when they go deep?
At practice, put a hand on your former defender after turns and play them close.

Are you too deep to gain yardage with a reception when your team is stuck at a mid-field sideline?
At practice, come in uncomfortably close and see if that improves momentum.

These are tactical decisions. As a player working to move up, you know the tactics of ultimate far better than I do. The point is to document what you are doing wrong during games and to create specific objectives at practice so you prevent those mistakes in the future. The better your notes are, the clearer your objectives will be. Clear practice objectives lead to bigger improvements during the season.

Pause, Then Recall the Intended Strategy

Every time the disc is caught by a teammate, pause the film. Jot down the stack that should be set or the play everyone should be running. There is always a larger strategy intended for various field positions and lines of players. Perhaps there was an audible (an on-field change of plans) or perhaps there was confusion. Take the time to remember what was expected of you during every moment of possession, then evaluate your actions against those expectations.

This has two effects:

you are actively reviewing the playbook
you are visualizing how to operate perfectly on the field

When pulling plays from memory, resist the temptation to actually look at your playbook! To learn your playbook well, you have to “interrupt the forgetting” of its contents. (That phrase is borrowed from Peter C. Brown’s Make It Stick, an excellent how-to text on learning complicated topics more effectively.)

Struggling to remember what play was active after the first pull of the second half and how that play is meant to flow improves your ability to remember plays, even if you misremember during this film session. Your playbook will always be available at the end of the session to review.

As you improve your knowledge of the playbook, the Xs and Os on the page start to seem more like moving poker chips in your mind. They change from being abstract descriptions of player position to being abstractions with names and faces–they become your teammates. But you start to see your teammates in a sort of bird’s-eye view while watching film. You are developing the skill to zoom out, which is seeing the bigger picture of a point instead of your normal ground-level view.

By zooming out mentally at the same time you watch your actual performance on-screen, you learn to evaluate your mistakes directly against the “ideal” flow of the called play. Over time, this vision of perfect execution improves your ability to read the field and sense the best timing for your cuts and throws.

Interrupting your forgetting of plays and zooming out will help blend your player’s eye with the elusive coach’s eye. As you learn to see both the forest and the trees, you will become a dramatically more effective player from any position on the field.

Rewind & Rewatch Plays Often

You are spotting trends in your mistakes and developing your mental zoom lens. One day, you could become a great ultimate coach with that knowledge. A crucial missing piece is the secret to every great coach’s enduring success: enthusiastically watching tens of thousands of repetitions.

Tom Tellez coached Carl Lewis at his prime and nearly two dozen other track & field Olympians. I met Coach Tellez in 2016 when he was working with a Rio hopeful in the javelin and asked him how to become a better coach. He replied, “You have to enjoy watching things again and again. And you have to always spot the thing that needs improving.”

Don’t expect to see everything the first time you watch a point…

exactly what type of error you made and when you made it
how your field position differed than the strategic expectation
where your teammates should have been positioned relative to you on every possession

Expect to never see everything. If you played 11 points (oddly, that is the average number played by a handler in the mixed division of Nationals 2016), each of which lasted 45 seconds (average number from the same), you technically only have 8 minutes and 15 seconds of film to watch. You should actually leave about 45 minutes for that film session.

Some time will be lost to scrubbing and fast-forwarding through irrelevant time on the tape. The 45 minutes suggested does not even include that time. Every time a disc is caught by a teammate, you should pause the video. Ask yourself these questions:

What play are we running?
How is the mark forcing the thrower?
Is that thrower capable of breaking the mark or should we adjust?
Where am I expected to be on the field?
Where am I actually on the field?
Who will be the next receiver?

After answering those questions, play the video, watching only to see if your predictions were correct. Then, rewind and pause the video again. New questions:

How was my defender manipulating my space?
What would be the best cut?
What series of steps or moves could create separation?
What was the actual cut I made?
Did I complete that cut?
Did I make the catch?
Was it easy or was it a stretch?

After those questions, play the video, evaluating how you interacted with your defender. Then, rewind and pause the video one more time. Last set of questions for this play:

After this throw, how does the strategy change?
When the disc is caught, where should I go next?
Where should my teammates be in relation to the new thrower?
Is it my job to clear, to come under, to go deep, or to wait?

Play the video and compare what you think should happen against what actually does.

Now do this for every possession of those 11 points. Over the four weeks which separate most major tournaments, watch two games per week (if you are fortunate enough to have that much film available). Game film is not a casual review of how you and your teammates played. Game film is an intense, focused mental exercise. Game film is practicing being a better player using your memory and your imagination.

Work Your Mind Muscle To Become A Better Player

If you build the habit of categorizing your errors, the skill of zooming out, and the discipline of scrutinizing the entire context of every play, you can improve your abilities as a player four or five times faster than waiting for practices to get feedback from your coach.

Learning to remember the details of a chaotic game, predict the outcomes of every on-field decision, and evaluate your performance against your predictions is an invaluable skillset. As you develop it, you will find that the game slows down when you play. Decisions become easier to make. Tough opponents feel more manageable. Weak opponents can be steamrolled.

Developing these skills for reading the field makes you a fearsome defender, a perpetual threat as a thrower, and a wily cutter. And you can do all of that without any extra sweat invested on the field. You can do it without a friend to throw with you. You can do it at home, by yourself, with no one to criticize you.

I wish my football coaches had taught us this. My desk at home smelled a lot better than that old locker room and I’m much more receptive to feedback delivered perceptively than I was to being the tired, sore, grumpy butt of jokes on Saturday mornings. You have the tools. YouTube has the videos. Go work your mind muscle at being a better ultimate player. No shame required.

Oh yeah: Scouting Opponents

P.S.: Of course, you can use these same techniques to scout your opponents or to watch championship teams to figure out their secret sauce. Treat this operation the same way:

identify one player to follow for an entire game;
categorize their errors;
try to predict their strategies, then compare predictions to reality;
pause & rewind often.

The legends of the sport become very human when viewed this way–very fast, very consistent, very smart humans. You might just become one of them.

And, one additional benefit of being consistent & smart: you position yourself better and reduce your workload on the field. The fastest players and the smartest players need less endurance. You can become a faster player by following the programs in my first book, Fast Kids Don’t Train Slow. You can become a smarter player by watching game film using the techniques in this series.